By Dan Ambrose: With Miguel Cotto and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez both not interested in facing IBOI/WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin (33-0, 30 KOs), many boxing fans want to see Golovkin move up to super middleweight and face the taller and heavier WBA champion Andre Ward.
The fans don’t care that Ward is perhaps 15-20 pounds heavier than Golovkin, as well as two inches taller.
Fans still want to see the fight. Golovkin’s promoter Tom Loeffler says that putting a fight together between Ward and Golovkin would be difficult to do because it would need to be a pay-per-view bout.
“Tom Loeffler said the financial demands of Ward would make that a tough fight to make at this point because it would have to go onto pay-per-view,” Kevin Iole said on Yahoo Sports.
I don’t think you can sell Golovkin-Ward on PPV. That’s not a fight that would attract enough interest for it to be on PPV. Besides that, I don’t know that it would be any bigger than Golovkin’s other fights against guys like Willie Monroe Jr. and Daniel Geale. There would be some interest from hardcore boxing fans, but the casual fans likely wouldn’t have enough interest in the Golovkin-Ward fight to make it worthwhile for PPV.
Ward never had a huge fan base before he took part in the Super Six tournament, and he’s not been all that active since the tourney ended in 2011. Ward has fought exactly two times since he won the Super Six tournament in beating Carl Froch in 2011. That’s two fights in four years. That’s not good.
“I don’t want easy fights,” Golovkin said. “I’m ready now. Not the future, but now. I want to fight Canelo or Cotto. I want to fight them now. After Canelo or Cotto, then Andre Ward can go.”
If Golovkin is going to wait until he faces both Canelo and Cotto before he faces Ward, we could be waiting for the remainder of Golovkin’s career because neither of those two fighters are eager to get inside the ring with the Kazakhstan fighter. It’s too dangerous for them to face Golovkin, because they’ve got a lot of easy marks to fight like Daniel Geale, Alfredo Angulo and James Kirkland.
Golovkin is willing to fight on Cinco de Mayo holiday next May in 2016. That’s a date that Canelo will likely look to stake for his own against an opponent still to be determined. That would be interesting if HBO had Canelo and Golovkin fighting in a split site telecast on Cinco de Mayo. I don’t think there would be a way for them to share the same venue, but they could definitely figt in a split site telecast.
I’m not sure how Canelo would feel about that because it would give him competition in terms of him trying to be a crowd pleaser. If Golovkin is on the same telecast on HBO, it would give boxing fans something to compare Canelo to, and he might not be able to compare against the arguably more talented Golovkin. Besides that, it would almost surely put more pressure on Canelo to finally fight Golovkin.
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